Santa Fe River Rise

That's it, right there on the left. That's where the Santa Fe River comes out of the ground after tunneling under for some three miles. Supposedly it brings with it a lot more water when it emerges then it has when it goes underground. Such a phenomenon also brings with it apocryphal stories of children getting sucked into the aquifer and then expelled months later, three miles downriver. I realized when I got there that I had been there before and the rise itself was frankly a little anticlimactic.

When I left the house this morning, it might as well have been nighttime--there was no hint of the sunrise and the clouds hung low. By the time I put in at 441, it was not much brighter, but the subdued lighting made everything  hallucinatory. I imagined faces in the shadows of submerged logs and ancient cobwebs in the muted grey-greens of the Spanish Moss. No appreciable difference exists between upstream and downstream here, and yet I imagined that my kayak was sucking down into the water as I approached and came back from River Rise. Perhaps the river really was rising here?

The lack of flow I did not imagine, however, and I tested that hypothesis by reclining for 30 minutes about halfway back. I have figured out that if I prop up one of the wings of my PFD, it serves as an excellent pillow. My boat did not move at all the whole time. I came very close, in fact, to falling asleep before I decided I needed to get back and begin the day the rest of the world was beginning.


The most surprising thing about River Rise was running into a friend, out there in the middle of nowhere, co-working with a co-worker. They know a completely different river than I do, and I felt envious of their knowledge. I paddle in relative ignorance out here, but I must admit that I love discovering the natural world as if I were the first person ever to see it.

Newnan's Lake - The Middle

The neighborhood cat pisses on my kayak at night. I don't blame her: it is big, blue and sits right in the middle of her territory. The problem is I don't realize it until I put in and the water "re-activates" the piss and then the smell is with me for the duration. Turns out it was perfect potpourri for what was a nasty outing.

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Nasty isn't always bad. For instance, I loved the nastiness of the choppy, Gatorade-green water and the spray that soaked me. Hell, I even liked the nasty vertigo I felt when I closed my eyes and tried to float. I did not, however, like the nasty 40oz bottles, or the cigarette boxes, or the sandwich wrappers, or the fishing tackle bags that always grace any part of the west shore of Newnan's where it opens up to the road. I am tempted to make a laminated sign or something to tell them to clean their shit up, but what good would it do? If people enjoy sitting in trash when they fish, who am I to stop them?

I was determined to get to the geographical middle of the lake and float, and I kinda did. The getting to the middle was no problem, but the floating was. When I leave it in charge of things, my boat likes to orient itself so that it takes the waves broadside and, since some of the waves were taller than the out-of-the-water part of my boat, I got soaked. This was clearly not going to be a meditative outing.


No matter, I would just sit here and welcome any of the three storms approaching Newnan's, just like my hero John Muir did when he lashed himself to the top of a tree during a thunderstorm. I mean, it's not at all insane to be the tallest thing in a 7,500 acre lake during a thunder and lightning, right? But all the storms stayed around the edge of the lake, so I waited for the Gainesville Area Rowers to slide past during their practice before I pointed my boat to shore and paddled in.

Whenever I am on this side of Newnan's, I use the lily pads as a landmark (watermark?) to get back, except this time the wind had blown them all together, so that at one point I was paddling through nothing but lily pads. I pretty sure it is not okay to do this ecologically, but I had to get through them. Lily pads, please accept my apology. For penance, I will bring a trash bag next time I come back.

Lake Alto

If I do anything for a week or more, I can't go a day without it. So by 6PM today, I was jonesing to get in some water, having enjoyed the decadence of sleeping into until 7AM this morning. Lucky for me, this little jewel is right down the road from me in Waldo. After an hour of paddling, drifting, and watching the clouds gather over the blackest water I've ever seen, I fell in love. I don't know its history, don't even know if it's man-made or natural, but if I ever find a house on this lake, I'll move heaven and earth to move there. It is silent, moody, traffic free, and big enough to actually be a lake.

The maps claim there's a canal leading to Little Lake Santa Fe, and I suppose there is one, after a fashion, but it seems only to be navigable by reptiles and birds. No matter, I simply paddled to the middle of the lake, kicked back, and watched the storm clouds gather over the south shore. Even the sound of the trucks downshifting on 301 fit in somehow. I regretted having to paddle back to the truck.

By the time I got there, a local man was pacing back and forth along the canal. He walked over to where I was pulling my boat out and asked me if I had caught anything. I thought the absence of any fishing equipment might have precluded the question, but I realized soon enough it was just a pretext for his telling me his views about various unjust local, state, and federal laws. I thought I knew where this was going and braced myself for the inevitable anti-Obama tirade. Yet he stopped me in my tracks when he described his worst fear: that the Republicans would be put back in charge. After a lifetime of having my easy assumptions debunked, you'd think I would have learned my lesson by now. No doubt I will run into him again when I return to this lake.

Silver River

I did the Silver River this morning. Yeah, that's right, the whole thing, five miles up and five miles down. Of course, at least three of the downstream miles were the sweetest drifting this side of Huck Finn, but I more than earned my keep paddling upstream. Oh, and my $300 Garmin GPS fell in the water and died, because I thought it would be "cool" to see where I was on the river, and where I was turned out to be a place where GPSs can get irreparably soaked.

The Silver is a heavily trafficked river, so I put in as early as I could get down there and was the first one in the water. I didn't meet a soul until I was on my way back downstream, and the only motorized conveyance I saw was a pontoon boat straight out of "The African Queen," complete with ladies in safari hats. I hid in a little cove until they passed.


I took a half day off from work to do the whole thing, because I've aborted mid-trip so many times on the Silver that I was determined to make it all the way to the glass-bottom boats if it killed me. I'm tore up from the floor up, but it was worth it: I've seen every anhinga, cormorant, ibis, wood duck, and turtle in the state of Florida and many of its finest gators; I know what it's like now to be completely stationary from the waist down for four hours; and I had a day of paddling so vigorous, I had just enough strength to get the kayak back on top of my truck.

Waxing philosophical about paddling is a fool's game and I try and avoid the facile stuff, but drifting for an hour without touching my paddle, letting the current spin my boat around as only it knew how, was nothing short of prayer--even with the GPS emitting its electronic death rattle in the back compartment. To know the birds by their calls, enveloped in the white noise of the cicadas, to feel the river actually lift your boat as the aquifer belches up a fresh supply of water, to begin to know a plant or tree by its smell, well, that's a sense of spirit I don't believe I've ever had.


Tomorrow: Who knows?

R.I.P.

Little Lochloosa Lake from Cross Creek

Feckin' Hydrilla! Is it edible? If so, we're in business in North Central Florida. It's either rotting or fresh and thriving in every lake I've been in, especially Orange and Lochloosa. It wraps around your paddle or propeller or whatever you use for forward progress and, yes, it is invasive and despised by nearly everyone. How invasive? Well, all our hydrilla comes from folks who dumped their aquariums in the lakes in the '60s. Highly adaptable, if you have it on your boat in one lake, it will gladly take root in another as soon as you put in, even if it has dried out a little.

I got a late start, which meant I was paddling into the sun the whole way out. I am privileged just to be able to paddle, I know, but this was blinding and unpleasant, made more so by the airboat nearby. The wind, though, was lovely and brisk and the anhinga posed for me without complaint. In fact, the more I spend time with the birds out on the waters, the more distinctive their personalities become. The Great Blues are old men playing shuffleboard with their polyester trousers hiked up to their nipples; the white egrets are pre-pubescent head cases trying to figure out how to open their lockers at school; and the anhingas are ancient gods, wiser than all of us.

It is rare that I don't feel much better after a paddle than before, but today I was exhausted and petulant and felt like this whole enterprise of daily paddling was a self-indulgent whim that I would tire of soon. I realize I am keeping this blog for me (literally, as I am often the only one who reads it. Damn you, Google Stats!) but there is a strong part of me that hopes it is of some good to others. /self-pity


Well-needed day off tomorrow. I need to clean my boat and do some readjustments and, well, sleep a little.

Newnan's Lake - Northeast

After watching videos like this for an hour last night, I decided it was time to put my big boy pants on and quit talking about alligators until one actually attacks me. Never mind that I seem to startle one every time I go out now. So what? Also, it took my girlfriend, who doesn't paddle every morning but who grew up in Florida, to tell me that they enter the water, not to be aggressive, but to escape land, where they feel trapped in the presence of bigger animals. So I hugged the eastern shore of Newnan's, in between the tussocks and next to the cypress caves because I also wanted to avoided bigger animals--namely the airboating gator hunters, coming back empty-handed again, no doubt. 


Using my camera instead of my phone, as you may have noticed, has allowed me to capture actual wildlife, but this has come at a price. My kayak must have come with the ability to steer directly where I don't want it to when I turn to snap a picture. In the case of the Great Blue Heron at the right, I ended up in a thatch of bullrush with a fat-bellied spider web--and its current resident--wrapped around my head. By the time I had disentangled the web and spider, it lay in a wet clump on the surface of Newnan's Lake. My apologies, dear spider. I'm sure it was a lovely home you had built. I also nearly smacked into several wasps' nests big enough to house my extended family, but I guess the early morning torpor prevented them from raising the cry.

My Kayak KonsoleTM arrived the other day but frankly I had gotten used to not having it. Nevertheless it gives me added "protection" and provides a a good place to house my camera until it inevitably falls into the water someday. The Konsole also makes entering and exiting the kayak a bit more difficult, as the line of scabs on my shins attests.


A ways up the shore from where I was paddling are the native canoes from 3,000 to 5,000 years ago. These were uncovered during a recent drought and remain there, too fragile to move. I don't pretend that my middle-class pleasure crafting in any way compares to what they did to simply survive, but to say I wasn't gratified to be paddling the same waters they did would be a lie. I love Newnan's like a family member at this point; it changes its story with every paddle.

Lochloosa Lake - East Side

On Lochloosa Lake today, I watched an osprey fish for at least 15 minutes. This one had a ritual: it would glide, take a practice dive but level off before entering the water, pull up to about 20 feet, then spear head first into the water, come up with a fish half the size of its body, drop said fish, and then soar back up, shake whatever ospreys have for shoulders, and then do it all over.

I was grateful to witness this, because there isn't much eye candy in the late afternoon on Lochloosa Lake. Houses line the eastern shore and the lake appears to be all water from edge to edge, no makeshift islands or coves. Clearly, I've become spoiled by the early morning. But these late afternoon doldrums forced me to enjoy the simple pleasure of locomotion and the wind the tall clouds brought in to whip up the water.

I put in at a fish camp--a fast retreating, old Florida-style business--and paid my $2 ramp fee to the proprietor. He was sincerely bewildered by my desire to use his lake just to paddle. I told him I wanted to put my boat in every waterway in Florida and he asked "why?" I don't think I was able to give him an answer, but when I pulled my boat back out and was carrying it to the car, he (drinking beer with his buddies now) called out "Just enough to say you done Lochloosa, huh?" I felt a little embarrassed, as if I had been accused of using the lake for less than useful purposes. So I muttered something about coming back some other time or trying it from the west side (which I do plan to do), racked my boat and headed home.


Tomorrow: Newnan's, the northeast part.